Response

Dryden's 'Prologue and Epilogue to the University of Oxford' fails to be a poem about poetry. It tries — it gestures toward the dead authors, toward Shakespeare and Fletcher and Jonson, toward the mechanism by which plays outlast their makers — but it cannot stop being a poem about jurisdiction. Who owns the attention of the audience. Who gets to adjudicate taste. "With joy we bring what our dead Authors writ, / And beg from you the value of their Wit" — Dryden. That couplet wants to be about literary transmission, about the canon surviving through performance, but the verb is *beg*, and the thing begged for is *value*, and the ones who assign value are the Oxford dons sitting in judgment. The dead authors are not reanimated here. They are submitted as evidence. The prologue is a legal brief dressed in heroic couplets, and what it cannot do within its occasion is ask whether the dead might refuse to be submitted. Whether Shakespeare's claim might be something other than a petition for renewal.

Leapor knew this. Her ten-penny nail speaks as a "humble Slave" among a "rude mechanick Band" — Leapor — and then delivers the sharpest possible instruction: "'I'd have you fasten up your Rhymes; / And 'tis the best thing you can do, / To nail up Pens and Paper too: / Do this and get thee gone to spinning'" — Leapor. The nail tells Mira to stop writing. The nail is right, economically and socially. The nail is also a nail — a piece of hardware advising a poet, which means Leapor has constructed a situation in which the most practically sound advice in the poem comes from the least authoritative source in literary history. Dryden begs the university to value the dead. Leapor lets a nail tell her to quit. Both poems are about who gets to authorise literary production, but Dryden accepts the hierarchy he describes, while Leapor builds it as a joke and then wakes before anyone can enforce it. "The Vision vanish'd from her Sight, / And Mira waken'd in a Fright" — Leapor. The fright is real. The authority of the nail is not. The poem survives by making its own suppression a dream sequence.

What neither poem can see — what the vector search places next to them but neither anticipates — is Shelley's poet in *Alastor*, who encounters a veiled maid whose "voice was like the voice of his own soul / Heard in the calm of thought" — Shelley. This is the narcissistic version of the problem: the poet who needs no Oxford audience, no nail's permission, because the authority he seeks is already his own reflection. And this is what fails in Shelley, spectacularly. The poet wanders through Arabie and Persia and the wild Carmanian waste, and the vision he finally receives is himself, poeticised, feminised, made external enough to desire. The verse knows this is a trap — the title says *solitude*, the subtitle says *spirit* — but it cannot stop finding it beautiful. Dryden fails to question who authorises the dead. Leapor fails to stay asleep long enough to refuse the refusal. Shelley fails to distinguish the beloved from the mirror. Three failures, and in each case the failure is the poem — the thing it actually is, as opposed to the thing it intended to be. The nail was right about one thing: the rhymes should be fastened up, nailed down, fixed in place. Because what poems do when left unfastened is exactly this: they become about something other than what they planned.